Like One: Poems For Boston

I received a copy of Like One: Poems For Boston last week and finished it today. It’s an anthology created in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. These poems aren’t reactions to, or about, those horrific events; rather, they’re more uplifting, to help with healing. The book’s proceeds will raise money towards The One Fund.

Edited by Deborah Finkelstein, it features plenty of great writing from poetry’s big names, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams, along with numerous modern writers as well, such as Dan Sklar, Doug Holder, Margaret Young, and Jill McDonough.

Rapt attention was paid to the placement of poems- you’ll see themes and similar or complementary subjects page-by-page, such as a poem about lipstick followed by a poem about kisses.

You’ll also find poems about luck, inspiration, and Nielsen Ratings, and an ode to laziness.

When I was reading Like One, I kept my eye out for passages that would particularly speak for the horror and aftermath of the Marathon bombings, the healing, and Boston’s strength and perseverance. This passage meets all of those criteria, and more:

The Soul Fox, by David Mason

My love, the fox is in the yard.
The snow will bear his print a while,
then melt and go…

Though the poem wasn’t written with the fox signifying something evil, one can easily see how the fox was indeed in our yard, and while the snow bared his prints, they did melt, and Boston will never be the same and will never be stronger.